Thursday, December 21, 2017

The Wintec Press Club luncheon is staged by the Wintec School of Media
Arts three times a year for the benefit of their journalism students. The guest
list features big names in politics, media, entertainment, sport, business, law
and the arts. And me. The MC is Steve Braunias.

It’s a brilliant idea and I have always enjoyed talking with the
students. I try to discourage them from entering the profession, suggesting
they instead do something useful or lucrative. The industry veterans like it
too because this is the last Press Club left standing. The speakers are usually
eminent media types – last year’s speakers included musician Dave
Dobbyn (whose band Th’Dudes controversially won the 1976 Battle of the
Bands, ahead of me and Jenny Morris); controversial poet Hera
Lindsay Bird; and controversial Herald
columnist and professional angry person Rachel
Stewart. This year we had Labour’s then deputy leader Jacinda
Ardern. I was banned from the luncheon with the then deputy Prime Minister Paula
Bennett, but here we are with the third meet of the year, on Friday 17
November.

The speaker this time was Sean Plunket. Back-story: born 1964; son of
legendary Wellington newspaper court reporter Pat Plunket; co-presenter of Morning Report 1997-2010; more recently
Director of Communications for Gareth Morgan’s vanity project, the Opportunity
Party.

Guests included Don Brash and his partner Margaret Mary-Benge (whom I
like because she is from Tauranga); Hamilton West Nat MP Tim McIndoe (whom I
like because he is very rude about Tauranga, having lived there); Waikato Times editor Jonathan MacKenzie;
Louise Wallace, “the real one not the Housewife”,
she declared at one point; television persons Jono Pryor, Te Radar and Heather
du Plessis-Allan; and Duncan Greive, the entrepreneur behind the Spinoff
website.

Brash was runner-up for best-dressed male; the winner on the day was
Barry Soper. The best-dressed female winner was a tattooed woman called Erin.

The best part of these lunches I always think is the pre-event chat. I
was seated with McIndoe and MacKenzie so heard a lot from Tim about what it is
like dealing with Winston Peters and from Jonathan what the future holds for
Fairfax. Eye-opening, both.

In his opening remarks Braunias kicked off with: “I understand that I
swear too fucking much.” He quoted my old Metro
boss Warwick Roger saying there was a question every journalist should ask at
least once in their career: “Are you by any chance insane?” He put that
question to Sean Plunket and I don’t think he got a straight answer.

In his opening remarks Plunket kicked off with: “Duncan, lovely to see
you, you fucking c—t.” This was a reference to a slight disagreement he and
Grieve had during the election over (I think) whether Morgan was available for
interview. Then he asked that there be no live-tweeting during his talk “because
it’s fucking rude” – correct – but also because the tweets would lack context.
Correct again.

He talked about his controversial tweet about Harvey Weinstein and the
pile-on that followed: “If fifty people who hate you already hate what you
tweeted, that is a controversy?”

The staff in the Opportunities Party all had PhDs so, he said, it was “quite
nice not being the smartest guy in the room”. As far as I can tell from the
internet Plunket did not attend university but went straight from school to the
Wellington Polytechnic School of Journalism, so he may be more impressed by
PhDs as a metric of intelligence than the rest of us. This also tells us a bit
too how he regarded his colleagues at Radio NZ.

Talking about the election he was censorious about Metiria Turei: “Checkpoint has never said what were the
nine questions they put to her and she resigned rather than answer them.”

And then along came Jacinda Ardern: “All the oxygen went out of the
room”, he said. “Suddenly it was Bill vs Jacinda, pale stale male vs new chicky
babe.”

Next, Gareth Morgan tweeted about “lipstick on a pig”. The Green Party
declared war on us, he said, “largely on social media”. As he tweeted back
“Bullshit, you were never going to vote for us anyway.”

There was a long rehash of the Duncan Greive/Spinoff story, which was
possibly of interest to the students because of the politics/social media
nexus. Then came a whole lot of politics, tax policy, snore. There was much more
about Twitter and Weinstein, in which he used the phrase “wilful
self-revulsion” of those outraged by it. The Broadcasting Authority, of which he
was briefly a member, “was inundated with complaints – which means they had
twenty. Fifteen of them were from Green Party members.”

Best line: “After 32 years in journalism you could probably use my ego
as tiles on a space shuttle.”

Then came question time, during which Margaret Mary-Benge suggested that
Sean Plunket, not Gareth Morgan, should lead the Opportunity Party. Plunket
shyly demurred.

There was always going to be a Harvey Weinstein question. Asked if he
had ever sexually harassed anyone at work, he replied, “Shit no!”

Eventually Braunias said: “We have five more questions while this train
wreck lasts.”

In his wrap-up – these invariably begin with “What have we learned?” – Braunias
compared Plunket’s account of working for Gareth Morgan with Pam
Corkery’s chaotic account at this same event in 2014 of working for Kim
Dotcom: “You kind of blamed everyone else.” About Plunket’s ban on live-tweeting
his speech, he said, “There wasn’t really anything worth tweeting.”

He concluded, “Maybe the problem is when journalists stop asking the
questions and think they have the answers.”

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

He was a clever man and agreeable, leaving an
account of the once-a-century Mallard ritual enacted on the rooftops of All
Souls College, Oxford, in 1800, but dying upon taking a bath as Bishop of
Calcutta, aged 42.

Are you as curious about what the “Mallard ritual”
might be as I am?UPDATE:

Thanks to Stephanie in the comments we learn that
the Mallard ritual involves the Mallard Song, which “was sung after a rude manner about 1658
about 2 or 3 in ye morning, which giving a great alarm to ye Oliverian soldiery
then in Oxon they would have forced ye gate open to have appeased ye noise”.

The lyrics may be found here
at the Mallard Society’s website, which warns that the fifth verse “was
expunged on grounds of decency in 1821”. If you are bold enough to explore, you
will realise that “swapping” in the lyric meant something different in Middle
English from what it means now.

Monday, November 6, 2017

From the edition of Saturday 4
November. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as
printed in the Waikato Times.

Monster
planet findToday’s (November 2) page 4 headline “Kiwi leads
team’s ‘monster planet’ find” once again dismisses scientific perspective as
the best tool for ascertaining cosmic truth, in our search for understanding
all of “existence” and our attempts to define “limits” to the universe. The
article clearly establishes that the “find” of the giant planet in orbit around
a small star which could not have “created” that planet, confounds the
scientific perspective of how planets and solar systems are formed . . . ie,
the perspective of our science highly distorts the search for actuality, when
the generally accepted theory of planet and star formation is now shown to be
wrong, or at least subject to exceptions, even within the tiny part of
existence that perspective and science arrogantly describe as “the universe”.

Even such discoveries as this one in question,
while a great credit to some of the scientific research going on in this field,
also serves to show us that the philosophical and intrinsic-intuitive
understanding of the reality of existence will eventually reveal far more
truths of its nature than our ego-centralised scientific perspective ever will.Dennis
PennefatherTe Awamutu

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

From the edition of Wednesday 18
October. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as
printed in the Waikato Times.

Remove
limitations

Is it to do with something that in this country
incredible limitations are placed upon students in schools and universities?

The terms of doctrinal demands to fit within hard
and set limits, universal. To solve these problems would be an education in
itself. Society can encourage exploration and excellence to feel the freedom of
peace where others can understand the way we see.

We see things now in a modern context way,
dictatorships and social subjection are outmoded concepts. It is for society to
decide how they are ended. Replaced with organisations created by those with
the wit and philosophy to allow people the gift of enjoying life.

Saturday, October 7, 2017

You stated that Britain remains the world leader
in offshore wind power (“Hull
of a wind behind it”, September 16th). That would be contested by the Danes
and the Germans who supply Britain with the turbines, the Italians who make the
cables, the French who provide everything but the turbines, and the Dutch who
install them. The subsidy, however, is 100% British.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

For younger readers baffled by their elders’ occasional
references to Dancing Cossacks, this was a three-minute “party political
broadcast”, i.e. an ad, for the National Party in the 1975 election. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

Written by
Michael Wall, then of the Colenso advertising agency, it was credited with National’s massive win. The ad was controversial at the time, essentially for
accusing Labour, led by Bill Rowling, of being a bit, well, you know, socialist, but looking at it again the
most shocking thing about it for me is the lack of an apostrophe in “April Fool’s Day”
in the first few seconds of the animation.

The dancing Cossacks themselves were on screen
for just five seconds, so 2.78% of screentime – from the 1 min 15s mark it is just National
leader Robert Muldoon behind his desk talking directly to the viewer about his policy
on superannuation and why it was better than Labour’s. Leaving aside the
politics, the ad treats the viewer a lot more seriously than today’s election
ads: nearly two minutes of the party leader talking policy, not feels. (Thanks
to Simon Carr aka @simonsketch for the link.)

It would be interesting to see some Labour ads
from that year – from memory they were made by Wall’s friend and fellow Westie Bob
Harvey, then of the McHarmans advertising agency.

Friday, September 8, 2017

Adam
Rutherford, a geneticist who tweets at @AdamRutherford, has posted on Amazon
a brief review
of AN Wilson’s new Charles Darwin:
Victorian Mythmaker. He gives the book one out of a possible five stars,
and heads his review “Deranged: literally the worst book I have ever read about
Darwin and evolution”.

I am a scientist who has studied evolution and
genetics for many years. I have also extensively written about Charles Darwin.
Singularly, I have never come across a more incoherent, inconsistent, deranged
attempt to analyse Darwin as a man and his science. If AN Wilson has indeed
researched this book for 5 years, as he has claimed, he has managed to do
something impressive, which is to draw conclusions which are so comprehensively
bonkers as to fall into the category of ‘not even wrong’. This book is littered
with errors, both trivial and fundamental, ones that could easily be
fact-checked. But Wilson seems not to care. His understanding of evolution, of
genetics, and of science in general is comically egregious – based on this
book, he would fail GCSE biology catastrophically. The anti-Darwinian arguments
presented here are not even as cogent as those presented by Young Earth
Creationists.

* To associate Darwin with Hitler’s policies is
at best misguided and at worst intellectually dishonest: Darwin’s scientific
ideas have little to do with the political ideas of Social Darwinism, and the
deranged policies of Nazism drew from distortions of the works relating to
Norse mythology, the Bible and a host of other sources.

*To suggest Darwin did not credit others who
thought on evolution before him is not borne out by the fact that he lists more
than 38 who did just that, in the Origin of Species itself.

*To assert that there are no transitional fossils
is not supported by the fact that there are literally millions of transitional
fossils.

*To suggest that genetics does not support
Darwinian natural selection is contrary to the view held by every biologist in
the world that genetics fully reinforces natural selection.

The only valid criticism I can find herein of
Darwin is that he might have been flatulent, which can be attributed to a
serious disease that he picked up on his travels on the Beagle.

And so on. I can’t for the life of me work out
how a serious writer could draw these conclusions about someone who has been
studied for more than a century, on a subject that millions of people have
spent millions of hours and millions of £££ testing. I can only conclude that
AN Wilson is not a serious man.

The pagination is excellent. I like the picture
of the bat on the back cover.

Fun fact: the original version of the review had “batshit”
instead of “bonkers”, and Amazon refused to publish it. This is the genetically
modified version.

So here is David Bowie live in 1995 with “I’m
Deranged”from that year’s album 1.
Outside. Gail
Ann Dorsey on bass, obv.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

The University of Waikato invites applications
for Writer in Residence for 2018. The salary is $52,000. Yes, $52,000.

The position is open to writers of serious
non-fiction, dramatists, novelists, short story writers and even poets. It
helps to have a record of previous publications of high quality, and (I am
paraphrasing based on my experience of assessing similar applications) making a
good case for why this particular residency would help with your project.

As well as the $52K the fellow gets an office with
computer in the School of Arts and access to the university library. There are
no teaching or lecturing duties, and the fellow will be able to make use of the
Michael King Writers’ Retreat in Opoutere for up to two weeks. A fortnight in
Coromandel all paid for!

On the other hand, “The Writer is expected to
live in Hamilton during the tenure of the award.” So, swings and roundabouts.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Keeping inequality in proper perspective, the
London Evening Standard last week ran
a full page article quoting Sir Patrick Stewart’s US National Public Radio talk
explaining that the dialects of British cows’ moos reflect, like their human
counterparts, ‘a society dominated by class, social status and location’. He
noted that ‘the sound made by a cow from West Oxfordshire, birthplace and home
to many right of centre politicians, is quite an upper-class bray compared with
those from West Yorkshire’. The National Farmers Union backed this up,
maintaining that when cows are mo(o)ved from one area of strong accents to
another, there is a problem of them initially not responding to the new accent.
‘Cows in the West Country have the distinctive Somerset twang (more of a
‘moo-arr’) while Midlands beasts moo with Brummie accents and Geordie tones are
heard Tyneside. And in the US, those bred in the southern states sound very
different from the moos heard in the north’. In the Anglosphere’s animal farms,
all cows are not equal.

I wonder if this is the case in New Zealand, that
a Friesian from Southland might have a different moo from a Waikato Friesian’s,
perhaps with a hint of a burr. National’s Bill English is a farmer from Dipton in Southland and Labour’s Jacinda Ardern is from Morrinsville in the Waikato, so perhaps this could be a question
in the Leaders’ Debate come the election. Can they tell the difference between regional moos?

Friday, August 18, 2017

From the edition of Thursday 17
August. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as
printed in the Waikato Times.

Seabed
mining

I see from your Friday paper that seabed mining
is back in the news and I expect that seabed residents will be driven out.

However they do not have mortgages or children at
school so I guess they will just move onto new pastures as they did in the Gulf
of Mexico and the North Sea, east of England, when seabed mining disturbed
them.

Friday, August 11, 2017

From the edition of Friday 11
August. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as
printed in the Waikato Times.

Predator-free
stupidity

The stupidest idea of this century must be to
make New Zealand predator free by 2050. Because most New Zealanders are still
science illiterate when they exit our education system, no one has thought to
question what this actually means. Consider the following:

1. Possums, rabbits, rats and mice are largely
vegetarian so cannot really be classed as predators. We will keep them.

2. Cats and dogs are predators. They will have to
go.

3. Fantails are predators of midges; kiwi are
predators of worms and weta; tuatara are predators of beetles and snails;
native owls are predators of rats and mice; and so on. They will all have to
go.

4. Humans are predators of rabbits, pigs, deer,
pheasants, many types of fish and farm animals. They will have to go.

If New Zealanders want to live in a predator-free
country this could be achieved by getting Kim Jong Un to aim his nuclear
missiles here. Do we really want to get rid of all fast-breeding animals, which
will be needed as survival foods when the next ice age comes?

The very first illustration [. . .] is a
photograph of a broken egg cup recently unearthed in the garden of her
childhood home, Steventon Rectory. ‘It’s not impossible’, reads the caption,
‘that Jane Austen once used it to eat a boiled egg.’ Well no, not impossible,
but…

After further consideration, Lethbridge
concludes:

There’s much intriguing historical detail but
also quite a lot of padding (‘imagine Jane happy, if you will, life before her,
running through the Hampshire fields on a summer evening’), occasionally
intercut with questions guaranteed to wake up the snoozing telly viewer. ‘Did
Jane ever have lesbian sex?’ is one. The answer, unsurprisingly, is probably
not.

Speaking of Private
Eye, in the 14 July issue (not online) Remote Controller reviewed ITV’s Love Island, a reality show “in which
all the narrative tension comes from who will shag whom, and whether it will be
before the first or second commercial break”:

What has shocked ITV is that a franchise aimed at
a target audience whose average evening involves four neck-tattoos and necking
eight Jägerbombs has scored highly with viewers keener on fair-trade nail
varnish and organic Sav Blanc. Eng Lit graduates will find that Love Island most resembles a porn movie
based on the novels of Iris Murdoch, with names uncommon at the font
bewilderingly swapped: “Theo said to Tyla that Montana said to Theo…”

Meanwhile, in America, Kat Rosenfeld exposes The
Toxic Drama on YA Twitter for Vulture. It is an extraordinary, long, thoroughly
investigated account of online book reviews used as bullying – passed on by
people who condemn the book in question without reading it – and the chilling effect
this has on authors. I had not heard of YA Twitter, which:

regularly identifies and denounces books for
being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that
engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other
marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches
when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of
thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second
nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature
in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about
reading.

According to Rosenfeld, such campaigns involving
thousands of people tweeting and retweeting and Tumblring and the rest:

are almost always waged in the name of protecting
vulnerable teens from dangerous ideas. These books, it’s claimed, are hurting
children.But a growing number of critics say the
draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing
dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity
advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social
interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Not a lot because I am currently editing two
manuscripts at once. This is not impossible, because only one is fiction, but
it is suboptimal. Also, there is a funding round in progress for one of the
organisations I help assess these things for, and it is quite a task working out how
much fiction is involved in some of the applications.

The Spectatorannounces the
results of competition 3008 in which entrants “were invited to take the last
line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written
in the style of the author in question”. Great idea. The clever-clogs winner started: “A
way a lone a last a loved a long the” and you would think that Finnegans Wake would be impossible to
parody but no.

All the others are good but my favourite was this,
using The Da Vinci Code as the
starting point:

For a moment, he thought he heard a woman’s voice
— the wisdom of the ages — whispering up from the chasms of the earth to the
splendour of St Peter’s. Langdon froze. ‘The wisdom of the ages’ — surely a
coded message! Suddenly, in a sudden flash of realisation, he realised it. A
totally contrived anagram! ‘An anagram!’ he realised. The Wisdom of the Ages =
‘Who misfeeds the goat?!’ Of course! Now he simply needed to find the
unfortunate ungulate, and guilty goatherd… before it was too late! Heidi?
Esmeralda? The Lonely… Suddenly, he had it — Paddy McGinty — whose goat
swallowed dynamite! A deadly coded warning in deadly earnest! And Valentine Doonican
= Neel doon in Vatican! In no time he found, behind the hassocks and dyslexic
Scottish translations of tourist leaflets, the sticks of dynamite. The Vatican
saved… but why had the clues been so obvious?

One by one, prejudices are tumbling in the West.
People may harbour private suspicions that other people’s race, sex or
sexuality makes them inferior—but to say so openly is utterly taboo. As most
kinds of prejudiced talk become the preserve of anonymous social-media ranters,
though, one old strain remains respectable. Just ask a childless person.

And Private
Eye reviews (not online – they’re not silly) John McEnroe’s second
autobiography But Seriously:

This is an extended shrug of a book, a pointless,
wildly self-indulgent ramble that reads like the transcript to an interview
with a celebrity magazine during which the interviewer wandered off for a
sandwich and couldn’t face going back.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

The July issue of Uncut magazine has an interview with serious rock person Jason Isbell in which Nick Abbott of
Leeds ask him, “Have you ever had any unusual pets?” Isbell replies:

Well, my wife had a cat named Richard Thompson.
She was opening for Richard on this tour. They were playing in a little opera
house and a cat came in and she decided tio keep him. So she named him Richard
Thompson. She tried to keep him in the van, but he threw a fit and pissed all
over the van and ripped all the seats open. She called me that night and neglected
to explain the situation. She just told me Richard Thompson had pissed all over
her van and ripped all the seats to pieces and said, “Oh God. He’s at it again.”

I love “neglected to explain the situation”. No English, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand speaker of English would
say that.

So here is Richard Thompson performing the Britney Spears hit “Oops I Did It Again”:

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Nice to
get a poetry collection commissioned and published in the UK. But a follow-up?
Doesn’t happen.

Peter Bland
parted ways with Carcanet, publisher of his Selected
Poems in 1998, which the Times
Literary Supplement described as “vivid and witty. His impulse has been to
continually celebrate the displaced and unremarkable.”

Then, says
Bland, “somebody said John Lucas at Shoestring Press likes your work. He said, ‘Why
not put together a collection of poems about your childhood in England during
the war?’ So it was his suggestion and it got some nice critical responses.”
Even better, it sold out. “Then he said, ‘Would you like to do another
collection with me?’”

Shoestring
Press put out Peter Bland’s Remembering England in 2014, presumably
to coincide (ish) with the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. Itmined
Bland’s smog-filled memories of the 1930s, 40s and 50s as well as the odd one
from the 1970s and beyond.

In London Grip, an independent
online “cultural omnibus” with a special interest in poetry, John Forth said of it that the poems “are marked by an artfully fluent directness which tries to
go unnoticed but creates a lasting effect, their meaning being very much the
meat thrown by a burglar for the dogs”. Bland writes about a “lost generation”,
he says, “their main gifts being ironic detachment, never taking themselves too
seriously and the sense of humour that made us”.

The
fluency of Bland’s work, says Forth, “is facilitated by his finding forms that
do not draw attention to themselves. In being ostensibly secondary to what is
being said in the poems, they become unobtrusively part of what is being said.
If you’re still unsure who his ‘lost generation’ are – You can tell us a mile off even now;/ there’s a touch of austerity/
under the eyes…//… a lasting doubt/about the next good time. The effect
here somehow leans on the word ‘lasting’, never mind the ‘doubt’ which might
seem to be packing the punch. Now that’s what I call style.”

Josh
Hinton in PN Review writes that
the poems in Remembering England have
“a gentle but powerful assurance”:

They do
what the book’s title suggests, focusing on the England the poet knew, or
rather, the two Englands: that of his childhood and youth in wartime, and that
of his middle age in the 1970s, after his return from sixteen years in New
Zealand. […] We see the boy in the bomb shelter: ‘Draw more ships,’ Grandma
ordered, / keeping us busy between exploding bombs./ So we did, on wood-flecked
wartime paper…/ The best were hung in old photo frames’. The violent backdrop
is almost (but not wholly) inconsequential before the affectionate memory of
children competing to see who could draw the best and win Grandma’s favour.

Shoestring
specialises in publishing poetry collections “by established but unfashionable
poets” or those who might be well known elsewhere but new to British readers.

“Not
particularly fashionable” is the style of the new collection, Working the
Scrapbook, says Bland, again heavily relying on the personal. It again uses
what he calls “the first person plural” — it’s just another persona, he
reckons, like the partly fictional voice of a memoir. But for him, it’s “where
the real feeling comes from”.

The title?
Bland has long kept scrapbooks, pasting in letters, photos, articles and
reviews, family “stuff”, poems sent to him, art images and other gatherings.
Often a poem will arise from looking at an old photograph, he says. The second
part of Working the Scrapbook includes the poems of Loss, the 2010 collection
he wrote after the death of his wife Beryl, and a couple of new ones.

For the
six decades he has been writing poetry, Bland has had a foot in both New Zealand
and the UK. In 1977 he won the Cholmondeley Award, a UK Society of Authors prize
that has also been given to Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Philip Larkin, Fleur
Adcock, Kingsley Amis, Allen Curnow and Alice Oswald. In 2011, having settled
permanently back in New Zealand, he was awarded the poetry category of the
Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement.

Health
problems prevent him from going to the launch of Working the Scrapbook on 30 June in London, but he says
fellow poets Kevin Ireland, Fleur Adcock and CK Stead will do the honours and
read some poems from the book.

The
Argentinian poet Borges admits that there’s a need among poets ‘to be familiar
with the renowned uncertainties of metaphysics,’ but only in order to make the
best use of staying open to experience, and ‘to help pass on what we don’t know
as much as what we do.’ The sources of poetry are as ancient as cave paintings
and the modern poet still has to have something of the shaman left in him in
order to be able to indulge in a little cave talk and to commune alone with the
deeper sources of his imagination.

Here is Peter’s bio
at the Academy of New Zealand Literature. His most recent publication in New
Zealand is A
Fugitive Presence(Steele Roberts, 2016); Elizabeth Coleman
reviews it for Takahehere.

So here is Peter (reading from his 2014 collection Hunting Elephants) with Kevin Ireland and Fleur Adcock at the Devonport Library in December 2015:

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Copyright Licensing NZ invites writers
of fiction and non-fiction in all genres to apply for the CLNZ/NZSA research grants.
There are four available: priority will be given to “projects of national or
significant local interest and/or those that add significantly to the field or
genre on a subject”.

Three of the grants are for $5000; the
fourth includes the $5000 plus a six-week residential fellowship at Victoria
University’s Stout Research Centre.

Aaron Fox received last year’s Stout
Research Centre grant to work on a biography of Brigadier James Hargest.
Fox, who like Hargest hails from Gore, says of his time at the Centre:

The access to the archives was
truly invaluable as it got me to the centre of the research. If you’re looking
for New Zealand history, you have to go to Wellington. Delving into the
archives, you never know what you’re going to find. I found myself in the middle of intellectual
debate and working with other people in similar fields can get you involved in
really stimulating conversations.

Monday, June 19, 2017

From the edition of Friday 16 June.
As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in
the Waikato Times.

‘Choice-less future’

I see that some schools are banning
all drinks at school other than milk and water. To some people that may seem
sensible, the way to go even, but it is only a short step from that to
inspecting lunchboxes and dictating exactly what a school lunch shall consist
of.

Social commentators are preparing
us for the choice-less future which will make individualism a sin. It will be a
robotic future where no one will excel and no one will under-achieve. Sport or
competition of any type will be pointless, because no one will be keeping
score, in case it will offend a “tomorrow” of no winners – no losers. Perhaps
in such a highly regimented and regulated “tomorrow” we can stack populations
of billions into accommodation built for millions, while androids do all the
work for us and even improve our systems to the extent that all innovation will
be their domain, not ours. Perhaps mankind will then find his true place in the
universe, alongside all of the other bacterium and viruses.

Will a past membership of Mensa or
a Nobel Prize in a family tree become a great cause for shame? Perhaps there is
a cosmic truth finally dawning. Perhaps it is not about us after all.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Stephanie Jones reviews
the new Paddy Richardson novel Through
the Lonesome Dark very positively (which is a relief for me, the book’s
editor, as Stephanie is one of the few regular reviewers I take seriously):

From a porcelain-smooth
introductory passage about the West Coast town of Blackball that could serve as
a model of exposition to students of creative writing – this, class, is how you
set a stage – to scenes of trench life in World War I, Dunedin writer Paddy
Richardson masterfully entwines the intimate and the global [...]

I doubt there is any genre or era
to which Richardson could not apply her virtuosity: her knack for inhabiting
the minds of others, especially women in duress, is uncanny and hypnotic.

Through
the Lonesome Dark has been on the NZ
bestseller list since its launch, and my reckons are that when it starts to
circulate around the book clubs it will find a whole new readership that will
carry on and on and on.

Monday, June 12, 2017

Rohan Long on Twitter posts this
photo, saying “These just appeared in my local
Bunnings and no one has any idea how they were made or how they got there.”

Bunnings, like Rohan Long, is Australian,
which makes it baffling that they would trial these garden gnomes modelled on Sir
Geoffrey Palmer (who was briefly 33rd Prime Minister of New Zealand, from 8
August 1989 to 4 September 1990) there.

They cost $59 in Australia. Why can’t
we buy these here? And what would the local price be?

UPDATE
A friend in Hamilton reports that Bunnings Te Rapa has these in stock. We have a suitable place in our garden, so I shall go tomorrow to check it out.

Friday, June 2, 2017

In my main office – Red Cherry café – this morning I had a conversation with a very
nice man who had this week buried two goats. His mother-in-law’s goats, which
had died for no obvious reason, so he had to deal with them by digging deep
holes somewhere on the farm, bunging them in and covering them with soil. One
of them had rigor mortis, which made things awkward, burial-wise.

I arrived just after he had
received a phone call to say that another of his mother-in-law’s goats had died, so he was setting off
to bury it. “She has three more,” he said gloomily.

He must be getting good at this: he
had buried a (dead) alpaca previously. If you know alpacas, they are
intermediate in size between a goat and a horse.

I said brightly, “This manuscript I
am working on is about the Otago Mounted Rifles – my grandfather’s regiment –
heading off to Gallipoli and three horses die on the boat so they have to be
disposed of. Carried up on deck by three men and hiffed over the side. They
burst on impact, apparently.”

He knew all about dealing with dead
horses on land. You get a truck with a winch, or something.

Paddy Richardson’s
new novel storms straight into #3 place in its first week in the Nielsen
bestseller list. Through the Lonesome
Dark (Upstart Press, $24.99) is not crime fiction this time but
literary-historical, about family and friendship, love and loyalty, the coal mining
life in Blackball – and the hell that
was the Western Front. It is brilliant. It made her agent cry – and you know
how tough those cookies are.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

In my early days at Metro magazine, late 80s, we had a
feature, “Why I live where I live”. People were interviewed about why on earth they
lived in, for example, Waterview or Kingsland.

I went to Te Awamutu this morning
to meet a young client from Pirongia who has written a terrific YA fantasy
novel. Good meeting, good café.

The 20-minute drive home to
Cambridge was through lovely country – really lovely country, with Mt Pirongia
to the west and Maungatautari looming to the east. Both are volcanoes, which is
only slightly unsettling. Playing on Concert FM was Ursula Langmayr singing “Zerfliesse, mein Herze, in Fluten” from Bach’s St John Passion followed by Lilburn’s
Second Symphony by the NZSO under James Judd. Both were New Zealand performances/recordings.

The sky was blue, the grass was
green, the leaves on the trees were red and I thought, really, this is all
right. I am happy to be here in New Zealand.

So here is Wynton Marsalis in 2011 at
Ronnie Scott’s performing “Autumn Leaves”.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Fancy $25,000? That’s how much the 2017
Copyright Licensing Writer’s Award is worth. Applications close at 4 p.m. next
Friday, 9 June, so get in.

Non-fiction writers in particular are
encouraged to apply. Any topic or genre is eligible, but applicants must be New
Zealand citizens or permanent residents, and also be writers of proven merit.

Full application details are
available on CLNZ’s website: the guidelines are here
and the terms and conditions are here.
You can even apply online.

Last year’s winner was Neville Peat for his project “The
Invading Sea”. There were 74 applications: the judges said that those that stood out “paid close attention to the awards criteria, had engaging
writing samples, and who were from applicants actively engaged with a
prospective publisher”.

If you are going to apply, and you’d
be mad not to, do pay attention to the criteria; do include a really good
sample of your writing; and it really does help to have a publisher lined up. That last bit isn’t essential, it just helps, but the first two are absolutely crucial.

Friday, May 26, 2017

The
Wintec Press Club lunch is staged by the Wintec School of Media Arts three
times a year for the benefit of the journalism students. The guest list
features big names in politics, media, entertainment, sport, business, law and
the arts. And me. The MC is Steve Braunias.

Most
tables have one or two students who get to meet industry veterans. It’s a
brilliant idea and I have always enjoyed talking with the students. I try to
discourage them from entering the profession, suggesting they instead do
something useful or lucrative. The speakers are usually eminent media types –
last year’s speakers included musician Dave
Dobbyn (whose band Th’Dudes controversially won the 1976 Battle
of the Bands, ahead of me and Jenny Morris);
controversial poet Hera
Lindsay Bird; and controversial Herald columnist and professional angry person Rachel
Stewart.

Media
star guests this time included the Herald’s
Matt Nippert; TV One’s Te Radar; former Metro
columnist Charlotte Grimshaw; current Waikato
Times columnist Peter Dornauf (as featured in Waikato
Times letters of the week #76 and Waikato
Times letter of the week #77) introduced by Braunias as “the
cat in the hat”; Louise Wallace from
“reality” TV show The Real Housewives of
Auckland; and Herald columnist Lizzy
Marvelly, her eyes shining with the light of certainty. Thrillingly, there was
also Lawrence Arabia, whose music I like very much. If I had known he would be
there I would have brought a CD and asked him to autograph it: one is never too
old to be a gushing fan.

Political
star guests included James Shaw, Julie Anne Genter and Chloe Swarbrick of the
Greens; Willie Jackson formerly of Mana Motuhake, the Alliance, the Maori Party
and currently of Labour; Don Brash, formerly of National and Act (he introduced
himself; I bonded instantly with his partner who is from Te Puna, near my
turangawaewae of Pukehinahina); and various people world-famous in Hamilton
local politics.

Charles
Riddell of the Wintec media course told me that this is the only press club in
the country left standing. Can this be true? It would explain why so many
journalists from around the country attend. It was a bit like the Canon Media Awards,
only a lot less drunk.

Lunch was chicken roulade with sesame and
hazelnut spiced dukkah, served on sweet carrot puree with a potato and herb
rosti with seasonal green vegetables. Dessert was dark chocolate torte with Black
Doris plum puree and an almond praline crisp meringue. It was quite nice. Also,
wine.

Our
host Steve Braunias, a journalism student in 1980, began proceedings with a
very long introduction. It was about three times as long as usual. Yes, that
long. Sample quotes: “this is the first day of regime change”, “election year”,
“the fucking National government”, “Queenstown, Hamilton of the South”.

I
was told when I entered the venue that I was not to report what the speaker
said. No reason given. On the other hand, I am a Life Member of the Wintec
Press Club and have
the certificate to prove it. So here goes.

Actually,
there wasn’t much to report. Jacinda read her speech from notes: there was
nothing about party politics, for which one was grateful; she talked mostly
about social media and clickbait on news websites. Which was relevant for the
audience, but was a bit dull and unquotable. However, she came alive at
question time.

Annemarie
Quill (reliably hilarious) from the Bay
of Plenty Times – that Tauranga connection again – asked, “Does Andrew
Little dull your shine? Do you ever want to push him off a cliff?”

Tony
Wall of the Sunday Star-Times asked,
“Do you sometimes feel like a winner in a loser party?”

It
was all a bit like that. The room liked Jacinda – well, everyone does. (I do – when
we met at the May 2012 lunch, she said she was reading
my latest book. And she was.) She handled all these friendly
but often awkward questions with grace and good humour.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Britain’s coal-free days are
celebrated – but ironically are down to Drax, Europe’s largest coal-fired power
station which, by burning wood, now produces 16% of Britain’s renewable energy.
This wood is grown in the US and brought in on ships that produce more
pollution than all the diesel cars in London combined.

Kevin
Prescott, Littlehampton

West
Sussex

It’s not easy being green. So here
is Kermit the Frog, with a visitor from Walton-on-Thames:

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Very sad news from Australia – New
Zealand-born novelist and literary activist Rosie Scott has died. She
was a fine writer, great fun to be with and a force for good in her lucky
adopted country. Condolences to Danny, Josie and Bella.

We were saddened to learn that Rosie
Scott passed away on 4th May as she has been so important to the organisation,
having served on our board and executive for ten years, during which time she
was elected Chair. In 2005, she was appointed to a permanent honorary position
on the ASA Council.

Author and activist, Rosie was a
greatly respected and admired member of the ASA community. While she was Chair
she helped instigate and then continued to champion our mentoring program,
working as a professional mentor for over a decade. In her position on the
Council, she was also part of the committee that selected the first 200 books
for Copyright Agency's Reading Australia venture.

Her first published work was a 1984
volume of poetry Flesh and Blood,
followed by the play Say Thank You to the
Lady, for which she won the prestigious Bruce Mason Award in 1986 in New
Zealand. In 1988 she published her first novel, Glory Days, which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards
and published internationally in Australia, Germany, UK and the US. Rosie went
on to publish five more novels, a short story collection and a collection of
essays.

In 2013 Rosie co-edited an anthology
on asylum seekers with Tom Keneally, A
Country Too Far. She later started the group We’re Better than This, a
movement dedicated to fighting against the detention of refugee children.

On Australia Day in 2016, she was
awarded Member (AM) in the General Division of The Order of Australia Honour,
not only for her service to literature, but also for her work in human rights
and inter-cultural understanding. Later that year she was also the recipient of
the NSW Premier’s Special Award for her “significant service to literature as
an author”.

As if this weren't achievement
enough, Rosie also completed a Diploma in Counselling and a Doctorate at the
University of Western Sydney, taught creative writing at the University of
Technology Sydney and continued to mentor and inspire young and novice writers.

Current ASA CEO Juliet Rogers said,
“Rosie will long be remembered and honoured within the ASA family, not only for
her celebrated career as a writer of standing in both New Zealand and
Australia, but also for her passionate activism, caring advocacy and thoughtful
mentorship to so many. Rosie left her mark on this organisation and our
thriving mentorship program is just one manifestation of this. We were very
fortunate to have had more than a decade of her leadership, care and support
and we will miss her. We send much love to her family at this difficult time."

Close friend and ASA colleague Robert
Pullan remembers Rosie:

“When she limped out of her last ASA
board meeting everyone clapped, not because Rosie was leaving — hobbling after
a hip reconstruction — but because she was as always the real thing, going because
she had to, going because she had reached the end of a small sentence — the ASA
one — in the immense Rosie narrative.

“On the wide wooden verandah in the
country retreat we shared for a few magical years in Buladelah, overlooking
grassed hills that stretched into morning cloud, Rosie radiated a calm that
eluded some of us in the collective, including me. She was our still centre,
smiling in greeting as the city latecomers emerged in the evening from the
three-hour drive from Sydney.

“‘I go through with all my characters
in a pretty visceral and intuitive way,’ she wrote in Movie Dreams, saying her struggle to acquire a male character’s
voice was ‘easily the most painful and difficult process I have ever gone
through writing a novel’.

“None of us knows ourselves entirely.
How could we, with the multitudes we contain? But conversation with Rosie
always contained the possibility of change and always left out hierarchical
errors of reasoning that sometimes stunted fellow humanists. If she was
tormented by the question whether writing changes things, I never heard her say
it. She believed in political action. And in her work on behalf of refugees she
pushed against evil in its most menacing visage in Australia and the
contemporary world. Her loss leaves a space we cannot fill but — I can hear
Rosie saying it — we must get on with it.”

Rosie’s family would like to extend
an invitation to all those who knew Rosie at the ASA, to her memorial service
which will be held this Sunday (21st May 2017) at 2 pm at the Marrickville Town Hall.

And here
is Rob O’Neill’s interview with Rosie from the August 1996 issue of Quote Unquote, in which she comes out against
malice and in favour of sex and exuberance. So Rosie.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

India’s “sand mafia”
is doing a roaring trade. The Times of
India estimates that the illicit market for sand is worth around 150bn
rupees ($2.3bn) a year; at one site in Tamil Nadu alone, 50,000 lorryloads are
mined every day and smuggled to nearby states. Gangs around the country
frequently turn to violence as they vie to continue cashing in on a building
boom.

Much of the modern global economy
depends on sand. Most of it pours into the construction industry, where it is
used to make concrete and asphalt. A smaller quantity of fine-grade sand is
used to produce glass and electronics, and, particularly in America, to extract
oil from shale in the fracking industry. No wonder, then, that sand and gravel
are the most extracted materials in the world. A 2014 report by the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates they account for up to 85% by
weight of everything mined globally each year. [. . . ]

Sand may appear plentiful, but is in
fact becoming scarce. Not all types are useful: desert sand is too fine for
most commercial purposes. Reserves also need to be located near construction
sites; as transport costs are high compared with the price, it is usually
uneconomical to transport sand a long distance. That, though, does not stop
countries with limited domestic resources (and deep pockets). Singapore and
Qatar are big importers; the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai was built using
Australian imports.

I have stayed in the Armani hotel (someone
else was paying, obviously) at the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the
world, and been to the outdoor observation platform on Level 148, 555 metres up:
I would not have been so confident had I known it was a hotel built on
Australian sand.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Aka The Cat in the
Hat: the sequel. In the previous instalment, Waikato
Times Letters of the week #76, four of the paper’s readers upbraided
columnist Peter Dornauf for his column of 17 April in which he complained about
the Tauranga Citizens’ Club asking him to remove his hat for luncheon. Today
came a letter from the president of the TCC giving its side of the story:

Dornauf’s hat

In response to Peter Dornauf’s editorial (April 17), the
Tauranga Citizens’ Club executive, management, staff and members endeavour to
welcome all our members, their guests, afﬁliated members and their guests into
our club.

The receptionist on duty on the day in question asked Mr
Dornauf to remove his hat as our rules do not allow hats to be worn in the club
room unless the hat is for a good reason eg medical, religious or for themes
such as the Melbourne Cup.

Mr Dornauf refused to remove his hat and
the manager was then asked to come to the counter. The manager also asked him
to remove his hat, he again refused and asked why he should, was again told that
those are the rules and the club employs the staff to ensure the rules are
upheld.

If any of our people visited Mr Dornauf at his private
residence (clubs are private) and were asked to remove their hat or shoes which
could be part of their identity, they would not hesitate to do so as a show of
respect to the hosts.

The manager asked his partner if he wore his hat at their
dinner table, she said no, but yet wished to wear it at ours.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

It is also obvious he gets strength from the presence of
[Michael] Palin. Towards the end of our interview, Jones reaches out to grasp
his hand, giving it a good squeeze. The pair hold hands for a couple of
minutes, a gesture that perfectly reflects their 50 years of friendship – and
its importance in sustaining Jones through his tribulations.

Alexander was a brilliant and unconventional editor whose
methods derived from Chinese Taoism: he achieved miracles while appearing to
practise wu wei, or “do nothing”. In fact, Alexander operated instinctively,
sniffing out writers whose style he liked and encouraging them, regardless of
political viewpoint.The effect was to rescue an ailing publication and set it on
a course of unwavering success. Those who credited him with setting the tone of
the modern Spectator, of making it readable, irreverent and witty, were partly
right.But the Spectator
began to deviate from his liberal, civil open-mindedness only a few years after
he stopped editing the magazine in 1984. This deviation took two, perhaps
related routes. The first was a hardening of the paper’s political stance,
first making it into a Tory organ (Alexander was never in his life a Tory) and
then into a right-wing-of-the-Tory-party, brexiting rag. The second consisted
of the introduction of a casual, jokey, faux-macho incivility – a malign
mutation of Alexander’s irreverence – aimed at shocking the liberal
bourgeoisie.

Two words: James Delingpole.

Dany McLauchlan at the Spinoff on Max Harris’s The New Zealand Project is the best
book review I have read in years. It takes the book seriously, presents its
arguments fairly (as far as I can tell, and anyway I trust him) and you’ll
never guess what happens next. Devastating because Danyl knows the territory so
well and is sympathetic to the views expressed – just not this book. The material
on framing is brilliant: why, it’s as if he has spent years around political
parties. Quote unquote:

If you pay more attention to politics, and read online
commentary, or go to political conferences, or progressive hui, and listen to
more brilliant left-wing intellectuals agree on What Must Be Done, it gradually
becomes apparent that the progressive left has the answer to every problem in
politics, except for the problem of how to actually persuade voters to listen
to them, and thus affect meaningful political change. Which is a shame, because
without that all the other grand ideas are pretty futile. All the talk about
What Must Be Done starts to feel less like activism and more like a form of
fantasy roleplaying, only instead of pretending to be dragon-slayers, or
vampires, progressive intellectuals pretend to be people who are relevant to
contemporary politics.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that we cannot experience
death because death is not an event in life. But then Wittgenstein never had to
sit through this unbearable new film from Warren Beatty, his first in 15 years,
co-written, produced and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, who may well be
affecting a kind of kinship with his subject, the crazy but allegedly lovable
billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Beatty may also like the low lighting Hughes
favoured.

I’m on the phone to Prince’s first wife and I’m trying to
picture the wrestling. He had a very strong upper body, Mayte Garcia says
brightly – but she had very powerful legs. “When he knocked me down, I would
take my legs around his body and squeeze really hard. So he stopped tackling me
down to the floor.” She doesn’t know why they wrestled – couples do weird
things, don’t they? Like the hypnosis. In her new book, she says she loved the
hypnosis because it was the only time he’d let her talk without interrupting
her.

Stuff reports
that, sadly, Wellington diners may have to wait even longer for Jamie Oliver to
open a restaurant there. They are possibly not missing much. He has, says
Stuff, “42 Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the UK and more than 36 abroad run
under his name.” Tanya Gold was not impressed when she reviewed for the SpectatorOliver’s
latest London venture, Barbecoa at 194 Piccadilly, overlooking my favourite
church, St James’s. Quote unquote:

I used to like Jamie Oliver, or the idea of him. I liked his
willingness to be a spokes-chef; to damn parents who feed their children Turkey
Twizzlers and roof insulation; I liked that he is fat. Then I ate at Jamie’s
Italian in Soho and met a plank resting on two tins of tomato paste bearing
greasy salami and cold cheese, and steak frites that thought they were Italian,
and I stopped liking him.

I began to think him cynical and money-grubbing. There is a
peculiar depravity to the mid-market family restaurant in central London that
offers bad value through a good name, and I cannot forgive Jamie for pretending
he was different; for pretending, as he ripped up basil with his bare hands and
told men, yeah, you can cook, that he was my mate. (That is the evil of
television. Fake intimacy.) The dish may have been called Jamie’s Plank, but I
do not remember. I hope it was. It should have been, even if the plank was me.

All of this goes to show that yes, airlines should probably
not make data available through a barcode scanner that they don’t want to make
available on a printed boarding pass. And yes, you are probably better off
using an electronic boarding pass on your phone, inconvenient though it may
sometimes be. But the biggest takeaway is simply that your personal data are a
lot easier to hack than you probably think. A wide range of seemingly harmless
slips of paper, containing your name and an identifying detail or two, can open
you up to a hacker’s attack. So the next time you check for your personal
belongings as you exit a plane, you might want to make sure your boarding pass
is among them.